For anyone that has not seen one of these boards, it is actually quite fascinating. An enterprising bootlegger(s) managed to replicate the GG-III CPU board from a Q*Bert INCLUDING the sound board – all in a package that is roughly two-thirds the size of the original GG-III board by itself! There are, however, a few limitations with this bootleg board. The GG-III CPU was modular in a sense. The original PCB included five program ROM sockets, and six RAM sockets for easy adaptation by Gottlieb into other games. The Q*Bert bootleg board only makes room for three program ROM sockets and four program RAM chips (HM6116P-3) which are not socketed. In place of the 93419 64x9 bipolar Foreground Register RAM, the bootleg board uses Fujitsu MB7063 (28-pin dip). In addition, the vast majority of bootleg Q*Bert boards were supplied without speech components. The spaces and labels are screened on the PCB, but were left off presumably for cost reasons of the Votrax SC-01a speech synthesizer chip.

I have been able to find two separate revisions of the Q*Bert bootleg board, and a number of boards with subtle component variations. It appears the first version of the board (I shall term this board ‘Revision 1’) was sold without the speech components.

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[ Q*Bert bootleg pinouts ]
[ ROM set 1 with one sound ROM ]
[ ROM set 2 with two sound ROMs ]
[ joystick hack ]

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